Navarro may have been playing a little loose with his facts and figures, but there’s no denying the positive energy around the high-flying Jays, who won their ninth straight on Wednesday night, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth for their first walk-off victory of the season.

And as fate would have it, it was Navarro — playing with a splint on his injured finger — who hit the leadoff single in the final frame that would serve as the go-ahead run. With Kevin Pillar pinch-running for Navarro, speedy Anthony Gose laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt along the first-base line that rushed Rays reliever Juan Carlos Oviedo into making an errant throw to first. That allowed Pillar — who went seriously airborne on a headfirst, superman slide — to score the winning run in front of an announced crowd of 17,309.

“Those guys got a good feeling in there,” Jays manager John Gibbons said afterward. “They’re competing. They’re tasting it right now.”

Exactly one-third of the way through the season, the Jays sit alone atop the AL East with a three-game lead on the New York Yankees. It’s the first time in nearly 14 years the Jays have held the division’s top spot this late in the season.

What may be most heartening to the Jays and their fans is how they won. Through most of their current winning streak the Jays have done it with an unrelenting offence, but on Wednesday — the first game in their last 11 in which they didn’t hit a home run, and the first game in their last 39 in which they didn’t have an extra-base hit — they did it primarily with their gloves, stealing hits from the Rays with highlight-reel defensive plays all over the diamond.

“That’s one area of the game we’ve cleaned up and we’ve got better personnel out there this year doing it,” Gibbons said.

Both Gose and Melky Cabrera made remarkable leaping catches against the wall to rob the Rays of extra bases and preserve the tie game.

“I kind of expect myself to catch everything,” Gose said afterward. “I really pride myself on defence. That’s what my game is. So I just try to catch every ball in the air.”

Meanwhile, Brett Lawrie made plays — at both second and third base — that only he can make: stealing a single from James Loney in the sixth with a diving snag and bare-handing a slow roller to keep the Rays off the bases in the ninth.

The stellar defence masked what was a rather shaky outing for Liam Hendriks, the 25-year-old Australian right-hander currently serving as the Jays’ fifth starter. As he did in his first start of the season last Friday, Hendriks made his outfielders work. Half of his 18 outs came on fly balls, many of them hit hard and deep. Though Hendriks’ outing looked good on paper — just two earned runs on three hits and no walks over six innings — he clearly wasn’t fooling the Rays, who whacked him all around the ballpark.

Before the game, Gibbons said Hendriks was not on a perpetual tryout and will be given a fair shake to keep his job in the rotation.

It may not be fair to have Hendriks’ job status hang in the balance with every start, but no level-headed observer can see him as anything more than a short-term stopgap, and if this winning streak has showed the Jays and their fans anything, it’s that, when healthy, they have the offence and defence to contend with the league’s elite. The only question right now is whether their pitching will be enough.

For just the third time since the winning streak began the Jays scored fewer than four runs, as young Rays starter Chris Archer mostly kept the Toronto offence at bay.

Recap: Blue Jays vs. Rays game blog

But Jose Reyes went 3-for-4, extending his hit streak to a season-high 11 games. Reyes, who in Edwin Encarnacion’s gargantuan shadow has also quietly had himself a great month, has hits in 17 of his last 18 games and has reached base in 23 of his last 24.

The Jays took an early 2-0 lead in the opening frame when — who else? — Encarnacion flared a two-run single into shallow right field, scoring Reyes and Jose Bautista, who needed a crafty slide to beat Jose Molina’s tag at home. The two RBIs raised Encarnacion’s monthly total to 29, second-most in franchise history. The Rays answered right back in the top of the second when Matt Joyce clubbed a double off the top of the wall in straightaway centre field and Wil Myers followed suit with a line-drive homer lasered into the Jays’ left-field bullpen. The stalemate remained until the ninth, when Navarro ignited the walk-off dramatics.

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